In 2019, during President Trump’s first term, New York magazine published an excerpt of advice columnist E. Jean Carroll’s memoir, “What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal.” The excerpt focused on an episode that had taken place years earlier, around 1996, when she was sexually abused by Trump in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.
At the time, Carroll was 52 and very well known, with a magazine column and an eponymous television show.
Trump was 49 then, not yet a reality TV star, and as Carroll’s friend the author Lisa Birnbach describes in a new documentary about Carroll, “a man with a bad combover” who “failed upwards.”
On the 2019 New York magazine cover, Carroll wore the same coat dress she was wearing when Trump yanked down her tights and violated her. Trump claimed he’d never met her. “Number one, she’s not my type,” he said. “Number two, it never happened.”
Outraged at being called a liar, Carroll filed a civil lawsuit accusing him of defamation. A jury found him liable for defamation, as well as for sexual abuse, and awarded Carroll $5 million. In his deposition, Trump had misidentified Carroll as his ex-wife Marla Maples. “I take it the three women you’ve married are your type,” Carroll’s attorney Robbie Kaplan slyly asks, in one of the highlights of the new film, “Ask E. Jean” by director Ivy Meeropol.
Meeropol, who has also made documentaries about Trump’s creepy mentor, Roy Cohn, and about the legacy of her own grandparents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, (who were prosecuted by Cohn), was moved by the way Carroll recounted the abuse. “Her style was refreshing,” Meeropol told me. “Women are kind of forced to talk about a sexual assault and take this kind of quieter position.”
But in the New York cover story, Carroll recounted flirting with Trump, and playing along with him after he recognized her from her television show. When Trump asked for her help picking out a gift for his wife, Carroll suggested lingerie and thought it would be funny to take him into a dressing room with something lacy and make him try it on.
“There was something so honest about it,” Meeropol said. “I started digging in.”
Luckily, Meeropol had reams of visual material to work with. In the 1990s, Roger Ailes (!) had given Carroll her own cable TV show — “Ask E. Jean” — a spinoff of her long-running column of the same name in Elle, which let her go in 2020, after 26 years with the publication, amid her legal tangle with Trump.
“A woman’s magazine fires a woman for standing up to a powerful man?” Carroll says in the film, which opens in New York on Friday and in Los Angeles on May 29. “As we say in the fashion world, not a good look.” (Elle maintained it was a business decision.)
Incredibly, the day after Carroll won her case against Trump, he defamed her again.
“I have no idea who she is,” he told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “She’s a whack job.”
Carroll marched right back into court with a new lawsuit, and in January 2024, another unanimous jury awarded her $83.3 million in damages.
That seems to have shut him up.
But it has not stopped Trump from filing appeals, which he has consistently lost. Well, mostly lost. Last week, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which previously upheld the judgment, said Trump can put the payment on hold while he petitions the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case.
As a subject, Carroll is an irresistible figure. She is a willowy blond with an incredible wardrobe, a refreshingly whimsical style and a languid way of speaking.
At Indiana University, in 1964, she was named Miss Cheerleader USA. That year, she played herself on the popular TV game show “To Tell the Truth.” (“Will the real Jeannie Carroll please stand up?”)
She married young in Montana and while her husband worked, she wrote furiously, finally getting her first piece — a humorous quiz about Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald — published in Esquire in 1979. “And of course,” she says in the film, “that was the end of my marriage.”
Carroll moved to New York and got all kinds of fabulous assignments during the heyday of magazine publishing. She palled around with Hunter S. Thompson and wrote his biography. She hung out at Elaine’s. She became Playboy’s first female contributing editor. She wrote for “Saturday Night Live.” Outside magazine hired her to take the famously indoorsy writer Fran Lebowitz camping.
“Uh, Jean?” that piece begins. “Are you awake?” “Yes.” “What the hell is that?” “What?” “That funny glare outside.” “The moon, Fran.”
For all her courage, Carroll says she was terrified of meeting Trump in court. He did not appear in person at the first trial, in May 2023. But he briefly took the stand during the second trial, in January 2024.
“He didn’t come to the first trial because that was just about sexual assault,” Carroll says. “But this trial was all about money, and boy did he show up.”
She recalls trembling as he took the stand. But as soon as Carroll’s attorney asked Trump to spell his name, her fear fell away.
“He was exactly zero,” she says. “He did not exist.”
Carroll lives simply in New York state now. Her rustic cabin is outfitted with sophisticated security systems because of the many death threats she’s received. If she ever receives the money Trump owes her, she plans to start a foundation for women.
Also, she adds, “I am thinking of getting a toaster.”
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